Within two to three days from the start of negotiations in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, it will become clear whether a hostage deal is in the making, an Israeli official told The Jerusalem Post.
“[US President Donald] Trump’s envoys, Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, are not coming to play games,” the official said. “We’ll know very quickly – by the end of the week – whether Hamas is heading toward a deal or not.”
The negotiations, set to begin on Monday, will include an Israeli delegation, led by Strategic Affairs Minister Ron Dermer, along with Coordinator for Captives and Missing Persons Brig.-Gen. (res.) Gal Hirsch, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s adviser Ophir Falk, and senior officials from the Shin Bet (Israel Security Agency) and Mossad.
The Hamas delegation arrived on Sunday evening, and Witkoff and Kushner are now expected to arrive on Tuesday.
Several Israeli and foreign officials told the Post that the greatest challenge in reaching an agreement will likely be the map outlining the Israeli withdrawal, as well as airtight American guarantees that if the hostages are released, the war will end.
The map, published by Trump on Saturday evening, proposes a withdrawal to the lines held at the beginning of the operation to seize control of Gaza City in mid-August. According to reports, Hamas is demanding a withdrawal to the positions where IDF forces were stationed in January.
Another indication of the optimism among the involved parties is the fact that preparations have already begun for activating the joint operations room between the mediators and Israel. This room operates during the execution of such deals to ensure that everything proceeds smoothly.
Mediators are optimistic
Even the mediators are optimistic that a deal can be reached “within a few days,” a source familiar with the details told the Post.
An Israeli official added that “Hamas understands it doesn’t really have a choice – it needs to agree.”
No part of Trump’s peace plan will be enacted until all 48 hostages are returned to Israeli territory, Netanyahu said on Sunday during a meeting with the Gvura Forum for families of the fallen. Additionally, he stated that if the hostages are not released by Trump’s deadline, “Israel will resume fighting with full backing from all involved countries.”
The prime minister also confirmed that Israel will be responsible and involved in overseeing the disarmament in the Gaza Strip, and no representative of Hamas or the Palestinian Authority will be involved in controlling the Strip after the war.
Currently, there is no deadline for the hostage release.
Meanwhile, around 900,000 Gazans have evacuated Gaza City since the preliminary stages of the invasion in mid-August and the full ground invasion on September 16, the IDF has confirmed. Further, the IDF said that around 100,000-200,000 Gazans still remain.
The numbers are not exact, as even the IDF does not have a precise science for counting, and could reflect that there were even more than one million Palestinians (the number most bandied around by the media) in Gaza City before the invasion.
These numbers indicate that around 100,000 more Palestinians have evacuated in the last week or so, when the number of evacuees had hit 800,000.
All this was a jump from the initial evacuation of only 70,000, following the evacuation hitting around 250,000 in late August and early September, but only hitting much higher numbers once the ground invasion started in mid-September.